Databricks raises $5B at $190B valuation after investors bid up a planned $1B round

Databricks has closed a $5 billion funding round at a $190 billion valuation, CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch — a round that grew far beyond the roughly $1 billion the company originally planned to raise.

The demand was overwhelming. According to Ghodsi, investors wanted to put as much as $15 billion into the company, and Databricks ultimately said yes to more than it had planned, settling on the $5 billion figure.

The CEO's explanation for the oversized appetite is blunt: AI is expensive. Ghodsi framed the decision around the soaring cost of AI infrastructure, where the capital needed to train and serve large models keeps climbing.

The round is a fresh signal of capital concentrating in the AI infrastructure layer, where data platforms that sit between raw compute and enterprise applications are commanding premium valuations.

Databricks is one of the best-known data and AI platform companies, serving enterprises that need to run analytics and machine learning workloads at scale, and its business sits directly in the path of rising enterprise AI adoption.

What matters now is how the new capital gets deployed — and whether the $190 billion mark holds up as cloud giants and rival platforms push deeper into the same territory.

Watch next: whether this round triggers a wave of follow-on fundraising among enterprise AI infrastructure companies, and whether Databricks' valuation trajectory continues.